Gourav Khullar

He/him | Langley Fellow @PittDietrich | I study lensed galaxies with space telescopes | ex@astrobites @UChicago @cambridge_astro @iitdelhi (personal account)

[Gourav Khullar @isskywalker]

I'm always late on Twitter and it's been a tiring month, but I'm going to cherish this for a bit: Michael Florian (U.Arizona) and I will co-lead a 70-hour Cycle 2 JWST program to study the building blocks of galaxies: star forming regions magnified due to gravitational lensing!!

[Cameron 🇺🇸 🗽🦅 @CameronCorduroy]

they've built concentration camps and i'm expected to act like it's a mere difference of political opinion

[ᴘʀɪɴᴄᴇ @justprince]

he’s actually Hitler but people don’t care since his crimes aren’t against white people

[ALUTHEDON @Mbakaza4L]

This is what a holocaust looks like.

[ALUTHEDON @Mbakaza4L]

The way we stopped hearing or seeing media about Lebanon and Palestine, and there are new types of bombs being dropped in a ceasefire

[Kaushik Raj @kaushikrj6]

Do you notice a stark difference after 2014? Earlier, for any scam, Manmohan Singh was targeted. This was a sign of healthy democracy. The buck stops with the Prime Minister. But now PM Modi is untouched by NEET & CBSE mess. People are questioning Education Minister, but not him.

[Vic Vaiana @vicvaiana]

All this in just 4 years.

Remember when they insisted it was impossible to build green infrastructure quickly enough

[Why U @vayunandini]

Correction. Blinkit didn't create 1,85,000 jobs. It created 1,85,000 people who own their own vehicles, pay for their own fuel, have no fixed salary, no PF, no ESI, no sick leave, no job security and are one algorithm update away from losing their entire income.

These men work 12-14 hours a day across three apps simultaneously just to clear twenty thousand a month. No company bears the cost of their health, their accident, their family. They are not employees but infrastructure. Invisible, replaceable and deliberately kept contractor coded so the balance sheet stays clean.

The 'jobs created' number is a marketing figure. It counts every delivery partner who ever downloaded the app. It does not count how many quit. How many were injured with zero compensation. How many are still waiting for their incentive payout.

And yes this entire ecosystem exists because people are too comfortable to walk to a market. That comfort is being subsidized by men who cannot afford the same comfort themselves.

And I don't give a shit about kunal kamra or raghav chaddha.

First learn the difference between a job and a gig before you make a PowerPoint about it.

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification.

Let me explain what he found, in simple terms.

Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE's new On-Screen Marking system.

He spent days reading through CBSE's evaluation tenders, scraped all 576 tenders CBSE has issued, and tracked how the rules changed across three versions of the same tender.

The core finding is that the company that won the contract to scan and grade 17 lakh students' answer sheets is Coempt Eduteck.

Coempt used to be called Globarena Technologies. Globarena was the company behind the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster, where software failures led to 3.8 lakh students getting wrong or missing marks, and 23 students died by suicide.

A government committee found systemic failure and negligence. Six months later, Globarena rebranded to Coempt Eduteck.

So a company with that track record won a contract to handle 17 lakh CBSE students. Sarthak's investigation is about how the rules were rewritten to let that happen.

The tender was issued three times.

> First tender, February 2025. It existed, then disappeared from the public GeM portal. Sarthak scraped all 576 CBSE tenders and this one was missing from the archive entirely.

> Second tender, May 2025. Four companies applied including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation. Cancelled.

> Third tender, August 2025. Coempt won. Between the second and third tender, a series of rule changes happened, and every single one made it easier for Coempt to qualify.

Here is what changed, one by one.

01. The old rules disqualified any company with a history of abandoning work, failing to complete contracts, or financial weakness. The new rules deleted this clause entirely. Coempt's Telangana history stopped being a barrier.

02. The old rules disqualified any company that was "blacklisted earlier." The new rules changed this to "currently blacklisted." Because Globarena rebranded after Telangana, removing the word "earlier" effectively erased their past.

03. The rules required Rs 50 crore average turnover over three years. Coempt's exact average came to Rs 50.86 crore. They cleared the bar by less than 1%. Earlier, a smaller company had asked CBSE to lower the bar to Rs 30 crore for fairer competition. CBSE refused. So the bar was kept high enough to block small players, but sat exactly low enough for Coempt to scrape through.

04. Software maturity is measured on the CMMI scale, 1 to 5. The old rules required Level 5. The new rules dropped it to Level 3. Coempt is a Level 3 company.

05. The cooling-off period for engaging retired CBSE officials was cut from two years to one. This makes it easier to use recently retired insiders to influence the process.

06. The old rules required experience with large projects of at least 5 lakh students each. The new rules removed the student count and counted cumulative answer-book volume across small projects instead. Coempt has many small fragmented university contracts. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS.

07. The old rules required bidders to own their own data centre and disaster recovery centre on Indian soil. The new rules allowed third-party MeitY-empanelled cloud hosting. Coempt runs on AWS and Azure. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS, which owns its own data centres. It also means student data is no longer on sovereign, Indian infrastructure.

08. The old rules required the bidder to own or control the complete source code of its software. The new rules deleted this. Coempt's platform runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS, which they don't own.

09. A last-minute corrigendum, issued right before bid submission, removed CBSE's own power to blacklist the firm if its software failed catastrophically. So even a Telangana-scale failure couldn't get Coempt banned from future government tenders.

10. The penalty structure shifted from punishing mistakes to punishing delays. The old rules fined the vendor for wrong scanning, merged pages, and unscanned books. The new rules dropped those and instead levied Rs 50,000 per day for delays. This incentivises rushed scanning over accurate scanning.

11. The old rules had a hard accuracy threshold, error rate not to exceed 0.5%. The new rules removed this number entirely.

12. The old rules specified proper book and robotics scanners. The new rules just say "sufficient scanners." The definition was vague enough that, as Sarthak notes, the scanning could be done with a phone on a stand.

13. On the security side, the contract required a VAPT (vulnerability and penetration test) certified by CERT-In before go-live, and a restricted beta phase before launch. The system clearly wasn't restricted, because the other researcher, Nisarga, was able to access it and find vulnerabilities four days before go-live. So the mandatory security audit appears to have been bypassed.

These are more than a dozen rule changes, all between the failed tender and the winning tender, all pushing in the same direction, all benefiting the one company with the worst track record in the field.

The security holes Nisarga found last week now have an explanation. The system was built by a vendor that was specifically allowed to skip the security certification, the source code ownership, the data sovereignty, and the quality thresholds the original rules demanded.

Following things need to happen immediately;

1. An immediate CAG audit of the tender process.
2. A parliamentary debate on the topic.
3. An independent investigation into
> Why the first tender vanished?
> Why the disqualification clauses were deleted?
> Why the turnover bar was held exactly where it was?
> Why the security level was dropped?
> Why the blacklisting power was removed at the last moment?

Sarthak, this is genuinely exceptional investigative work. Far better than most journalists with full resources ever manage. Take a bow. :)

[वरुण 🇮🇳 @varungrover]

A 17-year old having more courage, skills, and love for the nation than many big news corporations and their multiple award winning journos combined.

[ALUTHEDON @Mbakaza4L]

this should hurt to look at. this should make you feel sick. this is one of the worst tragedies in human history and you can see it from space.

[Leyla Hamed @leylahamed]

Germany NT players in 2021 protesting against the Qatar World Cup👇🏽

[Devika @Deyveeka]

Indian Govt has planned to set up such data centers in India where people already struggle with extreme heat and water crisis. Modi will turn India into hell!

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

How is this not the headline in every major news outlet?

[Tulkun 🌱 @HeDgeN1ght]

i just laugh at people who pretend this country hasn’t radically changed in the last 10 years

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

to whomever made this: thank you from the wells of history and farthest echoes of indigenous screams for justice for this labor of love and justice.
their terror will not be whitewashed.

[V @TheBrownUmbreon]

For a country so crippling with heat and no safe water for billions we want to build this abomination. Please stop for the love of god

[Aritra Ghosh I অরিত্র ঘোষ @aritraghsh09]

🔭 Paper Day! 🔭

Introducing Hyrax — an astro-focused ML framework built for the era of Rubin, Roman, and Euclid

Handles the entire ML lifecycle: from data acquisition → training → inference → interactive latent-space discovery.

pip install hyrax

(1/n) 🧵 #astronomy

[Aritra Ghosh I অরিত্র ঘোষ @aritraghsh09]

To learn more, check out:

🌐 arXiv: https://t.co/7cCHYMUNfU
💻 Code: https://t.co/F66auXq4lN
📚 Docs & 🎓 Tutorials: : https://t.co/J4YxnwYBgy

Co-led with Drew Oldag and Michael Taurso, with an amazing team across @uwdirac, CMU, Pitt, UMN, Yale & more!

(12/n)

[Aritra Ghosh I অরিত্র ঘোষ @aritraghsh09]

Showcase #2:
🔭 Cluster-Scale Lens hunting with Hyrax in collab with @isskywalker

UMAP + DBSCAN found a galaxy cluster overdensity in Rubin DP1 → human-in-the-loop spotted a lensed arc behind it → Euclid VIS confirmed presence

Gemini follow-up incoming 👀

(9/n)

[bONGO🪻 @wariocolosseum]

what an utterly useless dogshit company